Skinamarink

The year is 1995. Four-year-old Kevin and six-year-old Kaylee wake in the middle of the night and can't find their father. Then they notice that the house itself is receding: the windows go, then the doors, then the objects. The children go downstairs, switch on the television and watch cartoons in the dark. That is roughly all the film tells you in any conventional sense — the rest is ceilings, corners, hallways and half-visible details, lit by the glow of a CRT television. Much of the dialogue is barely audible and reaches us through subtitles; throughout, the viewer has to follow their own eyes and ears.

Kyle Edward Ball previously ran a YouTube channel called Bitesized Nightmares, where viewers posted their nightmares and he filmed them. Skinamarink grew out of what kept recurring in those submissions: the parents are gone, the child is alone in the house, and something is there. He tested the idea first in a short, Heck (2020). The shoot took one week in August 2021 on a budget of fifteen thousand dollars, most of it crowdfunded — in Ball's childhood home in Edmonton, with his own childhood toys, and largely lit by the switched-on television. The cartoons on screen are all public domain, as is the children's song behind the title: Ball heard it in a scene from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and altered the spelling just enough that children searching for the song wouldn't stumble onto his film.

Ball's reference points don't come from horror. He has named Chantal Akerman, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Kubrick and Lynch, and cites Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) as an influence on the form. The one model from inside the genre was Black Christmas (1974) — explaining a set-up to a cinematographer who hadn't seen it, Ball would say: "this is my Black Christmas shot."

The film premiered at the Fantasia festival in Montreal in July 2022, then leaked onto the internet from another festival's online platform. That is where its real story starts: it was re-uploaded to YouTube again and again, clips spread on TikTok and Reddit, and within weeks it had acquired a reputation as the scariest film ever made — nothing quite like it since The Blair Witch Project (1999). IFC Midnight put it on 629 screens in January 2023, and the gross climbed past two million dollars. Most critics came down in its favour: across 137 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes a clear majority are positive despite reservations, and Rolling Stone called it "quiet horror at its finest," precisely because "it already knows that our imagination will do half of the work." Audiences remain split, and not without reason: anyone expecting a conventional horror film will be disappointed. The Guardian's critic, for one, was simply bored.